Speaker 1: Today I'm going to show you how a custom precision channel strip can transform a great-sounding voice into an epic, larger-than-life voiceover. I'm Lenny B., the voiceover audio engineer. Let's make your voice sound better. Mostly what I do is create custom channel strip settings for voiceover clients from all over the world. And today I'm going to walk you through this voiceover submission from Doug Daly, who's got a great voice. He's from Dallas, Texas, and he's recording his voice on a Sennheiser MKH-416, which is a great mic, a shotgun mic. He's recording through a Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface and using Reaper software. He says he's not a beginner, but he has a lot to learn. And he also says that he loves the YouTube channel. Thank you so much, Doug, for watching and subscribing. And he says, while I can hear the difference when I adjust my EQ, I can't really tell if it's better or not. I can only hear that it's different. That's just a common, common thing for voiceover artists. And all I can tell you is, I promise you, you'll love my EQ course, because that's exactly what it does. It trains you on what to listen for when you're doing some EQ. And I'm going to walk you through what I've done for his voice in this video here. But once you absorb the idea of approaching audio in frequency bands and looking at it that way, you'll begin to understand exactly what to listen for, and then EQing really becomes much easier. It doesn't happen overnight. It takes a little bit of practice. But I get just wonderful, wonderful feedback from people that have gone through my EQ course. You can find it on my website. I promise you, you'll thank me. And I'd love to hear from you if you've already been through the course. Because that's what it does. It trains you to be able to EQ your own voice with confidence and purpose. All right, I'm going to disengage the plugins that I've applied to create a custom channel strip. And let's listen to Doug's voice with no processing whatsoever. And you could take a look at the input and output meters here. So we could see that he's got a really nice, strong, but not too strong recording level.

Speaker 2: Come taste the love that goes into our delicious food. We've changed the taco game. Innovative street food, delicious and unique.

Speaker 1: They say he's got pipes. He's got the pipes. Nice, thick, warm, bassy tone. I really do like the Sennheiser MKH-416. It's a shotgun mic, and it's really commonly used for dialogue on film and TV. But it does a great job of capturing a real smooth frequency response. Now what I want to do in this video is kind of run you through each specific plugin that I'm using to build the complete channel strip. And we'll go through each one by one, and I'll just explain a little bit what I've done. And then together, you know, it's made the channel strip. And then at the end, I'll play you the before and after all the processing. And you can hear the difference. It's the first thing I did was I added Softube's saturation knob. And this is going first in the chain. And here I'll play before and after just to show you how it's very, very slight.

Speaker 2: Come taste the love that goes into our delicious food. We've changed the taco game. Innovative street food, delicious and unique.

Speaker 1: It may seem like a really small insignificant addition, but when you add everything together, like I'll show you what we're doing here, it does make a pretty big difference. All right. So after the saturator, I'm going into the channel EQ, which is this one here. I am hearing a little bit of a reflection in this room, and this is kind of taking care of it. But let's, now I've shut the, I've shut off the saturator. And we're going to listen to before and after just the EQ sound.

Speaker 2: Come taste the love that goes into our delicious food. We've changed the taco game. Innovative street food, delicious and unique.

Speaker 1: This one here was pretty prominent. And then there's some other resonance peaks that just had this mid kind of, I don't know, what do you want to call it? Nasally kind of tinny sound, a little upper mid peak. So we took care of those. And here, I'll shut this off now. And let's see, the next thing I go is into the Avalon. Now I'm using the Avalon's compressor and just a little bit of high and low EQ. I'm not using any of the mid EQ. I'm using the channel strip because it's a little bit more of a surgical kind of a fix that I was doing. And so let's listen before and after. Now I've shut off the EQ. I've shut off the distortion, the saturator. So this is just, I just want to show you just what the Avalon 737 is doing. So it's just the EQ and a little bit of EQ and compression that we're hearing here. So here's before and after.

Speaker 2: Come taste the love that goes into our delicious food. We've changed the taco game. Innovative street food, delicious and unique.

Speaker 1: Now when I add the compression here, I notice that those resonance peaks and those mid frequencies really kind of jump out at me. I'm going to back this off just a little bit because it seems a lot louder.

Speaker 2: Come taste the love that goes into our delicious food. We've changed the taco game. Innovative street food, delicious and unique.

Speaker 1: It's actually not. It sounds a little louder, but it's pretty similar here on the meter. So I'm going to leave it the way it was because I had that set pretty good here. Then after the Avalon, let me shut that off. After the Avalon, we go into the Schepps channel, which I absolutely love. It's such a great multi-effects plugin. There's a preamp. It has a saturation in it. There's a gate, a de-esser EQ comp, and you can add another EQ or whatever. Actually, you could add, I think, a couple different effects or even a third waves, different waves effect you could add here. It's really great, but I'm only using the gate. Actually, I'm using the expander and the de-esser. That's the only thing I'm using because I like the way this works. I wanted to add the compressor from the Avalon. I wanted to add a little different low-end saturation, and I like the specificity that I can use from the channel EQ from Logic. So I'm kind of picking and choosing my favorites for this particular project. That's why it's kind of all over the place. Let's listen to the processing that the Schepps omnichannel is doing without anything else. It's just the expander gate and the de-esser here. So we'll first play it without any processing from the omnichannel. Then I'll activate it.

Speaker 2: Come taste the love that goes into our delicious food. We've changed the taco game. Innovative street food, delicious and unique to make a menu full of very unique tacos. Enjoy Taco Tuesdays.

Speaker 1: The expander gate really cleans up the noise or any of the room noise in between the words, and then the de-esser is really transparent. I like it when you dial it in. It does its job and you don't really notice it, which is great for a de-esser on voiceover, in my opinion. Now, I'm really impressed with the sound of all of these combined together in this particular order, and I want to show it to you. You know, you can send me your voiceover to process just like I'm doing here. You can get all the details on my website. It's LennyB.com. There's a link in the description. It'll take you right to the page, but you could submit your voice, and then I choose submissions to feature on these YouTube videos. So please submit your voice. Be bold and put it out there. You can stay anonymous if you want. And if you're looking to improve your voice, I have training courses for sale, but I also have free tips and techniques on my website for free. LennyB.com. All right, we've minimized some of these plugins so I can fit them all on the screen here. And now we're going to hear what it sounds like without any of the processing, and then I'm going to put them all on at one time so you can hear the difference. And it's a pretty drastic change. Now, remember, we're going saturation and into the EQ. Then I'm doing the compressor, a little more EQ for sweetening, and then we're getting the gate and the de-esser afterwards. So let's hear what Doug's voice sounds like with the custom channel strip.

Speaker 2: Come taste the love that goes into our delicious food. We've changed the taco game. Innovative street food, delicious and unique to make a menu full of very unique tacos. Enjoy Taco Tuesdays with $3 house favorites. Great food and great vibes. On the first of every month, we introduce a new delicious taco creation. This month, it's lean green with asparagus spears and a tempura butter over melted cheese. Stop by soon and taste the love. Subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one,

Speaker 1: and leave me your comments. I do my best to answer the questions completely. If you're curious about any of the stuff that I've done here, LennyB.com is the website for voiceover tips and training and also information about this custom preset service that I offer to clients. Your voiceover sound should inspire you. Let's make your voice sound better.